Consumers Energy: Future Proofing their Cloud Strategy

The Background

Consumers Energy provides natural gas and electricity to over 6 million of Michigan’s 10 million residents and has been for more than 130 years with a booming workforce consisting of 15,000 contractors. Consumers Energy came to LoadSpring with a Cloud-First strategy in 2013. LoadSpring empowered this strategy and began providing cloud-hosted solutions for Oracle P6 besides other project management apps via LOADSPRING CLOUD PLATFORM, allowing them to manage projects of any size with this cloud-based, robust, and easy-to-use solution.

The Challenge

As a regulated utility, Consumers Energy’s goal is to capitalize the cost of cloud services as prescribed by their regulator, the Michigan Public Service Commission. One of Consumers Energy’s biggest challenges was integration with other systems of records to simplify operations for a consistent experience without sacrificing performance or data management capabilities. Consumers Energy worked closely with the IT Department Portfolio Manager who supports many of their internal business partners including Engineering (Electric and Gas), Consumers Environmental Group and Ops Support, including EPMO.

The Solution

LoadSpring’s LOADSPRING CLOUD PLATFORM accomplishes complex integration, designed with technical, functional and business audience expectations in mind. With consistently high performance, the platform easily meets the demands for simple flawless integration with multiple systems of record. Consumers Energy can rely on LoadSpring’s locked down security and encryption with a single-source sign on which can increase overall compliance with industry and government regulations without compromising the user experience making it a secure choice for the most demanding app workloads.

Business Benefit

Consumers Energy can focus on other areas of innovation instead of allocating precious resources to managing internal software. Going forward, Consumers Energy team members have secure access to project controls applications relieving their internal IT team of the burden and expense of maintaining the servers, networking, databases, and applications. Consumers Energy’s implementation costs can be capitalized over the economic life of hosting. Additionally, LoadSpring provides Business Analyst support to Consumers Energy which connects the dots between complex IT infrastructure and software and their business objectives for both the project and executive stakeholders helping to maintain focus on ROI and results.

Digital Journey

LoadSpring has made the following contributions to the project success:

• LoadSpring Private Cloud Enterprise to 4-hour RTO and 4-hour RPO
• Dedicated Enterprise Customer Manager (Business Analyst) Technical Account Management
• Hosting and Management of the following Applications:
  — Oracle Primavera Unifier
  — Oracle Contract Manager
  — Oracle BI Publisher
  — Primavera P6
• Advanced Identity Management for Federated Login to LOADSPRING CLOUD PLATFORM

LoadSpring gives Consumers Energy a robust set of capabilities for migrating or deploying new app workloads eliminating any performance or scalability challenges. Project portfolio management, business intelligence, and scheduling software are just some of the applications we expertly host and manage for Consumers Energy, making their digital journey with LoadSpring a secure choice that allows for an agile, future-proof, Cloud-First strategy.